Home Office Unsatisfied with Police System, Seeks Help Moving to AWS

The Home Office is unsatisfied with the current system in which the Police National Computer resides and is seeking a partner to move it to Amazon Web Services.

In a tender put out on the government digital market place the Home Office states they are looking for someone to undertake the: “Migration and upgrade of Police National Systems from a traditional on-premise datacentre to Amazon Web Services.”

Currently the Police Open Systems are located in a traditional datacentre that deals with the extended storage needs of the Police National Computer.

However the Home Office notes that the: “The software and infrastructure on which these systems reside is not of a satisfactory status or versioning, and as such there is a desire to migrate these systems to Amazon Web Services.”

Problems to be Solved

The contract winner will be responsible for the design of a new AWS architecture that will support the existing Police systems with a particular focus storage capabilities and network support.

They will also be involved in supporting the user acceptance testing (UAT) and the forces Go Live activities.

The closing date for applications is the 28th of August, while the latest start date for the project is the 1st of October.

No budget or contract fee was disclosed in the Home Offices tender.

The work will be carried out at the Home Office departments in Hendon and Croydon.

The Home Office estimates that the team size required to complete the work will be between three to five personnel who hold a variety of skill sets cloud architecture, development and security.

“The supplier will be required to provision and manage the AWS architecture (using the Home Office AWS subscription) during migration. The supplier will also manage the AWS architecture during the handover of live services to permanent Home Office resources.”

The exact detail specifications of the task are sparse in the tender, yet it does state that they have: “No preference with regards to the method in which the supplier choses [sic] to facilitate the transformation above and beyond those highlighted in the requirements.”

“We will support any option so long as the services are migrated, within the aforementioned timescales, to a secure, supportable and accreditable state.”